The Year 1000- What Life Was Like At the Turn of The First Millennium

by Robert Lacey

  THE YEAR 1000

  WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE AT THE TURN OF

  THE FIRST MILLENNIUM

  An Englishman's World

  ROBERT LACEY and DANNY DANZIGER

  Copyright © 1999 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger

  Monthly chapter illustrations from the Julius Work Calendar, c. ad 1020, Canterbury Cathedral, reproduced courtesy of the British Library

  Also by Robert Lacey

  Robert, Earl of Essex

  The Life and Times of Henry VIII

  The Queens of the North Atlantic

  Sir Walter Ralegh

  Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor

  The Kingdom

  Princess

  Aristocrats

  Ford: The Men and the Machine

  Queen Mother

  Little Man

  Grace

  Sotheby's - Bidding For Class

  Also by Danny Danziger

  The Happiness Book

  All in a Day's Work

  Eton Voices

  The Noble Tradition

  The Cathedral

  Lost Hearts

  The Orchestra

  To our partners and colleagues at Cover magazine

  I warmly welcome your eager desire to know something of the doings and sayings of the great men of the past, and of our own nation, in particular.

  The Venerable Bede (673-733)

  And some there be which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.

  Ecclesiasticus, chapter xliv, verse 9

  We dare not lengthen this book much more, lest it be out of moderation and should stir up men's antipathy because of its size.

  Aeljric, schoolteacher of Cerne Abbas, later Abbot of Eynsham (c. 995-1020)

  THE JULIUS WORK CALENDAR

  The Wonder of Survival

  It was an oak tree that provided the ink, from a boil-like pimple growing out of its bark. A wasp had gnawed into the wood to lay its eggs there, and, in self-defence, the tree formed a gall round the intrusion, circular and hard-skinned like a crab apple, full of clear acid. Encaustum was what they called ink in the year 1000, from the Latin caustere, to bite, because the fluid from the galls on an oak tree literally bit into the parchment, which was flayed from the skin of lamb or calf or kid. Ink was a treacly liquid in those days. You crushed the oak galls in rainwater or vinegar, thickened it with gum arabic, then added iron salts to colour the acid.

  The colouring selected by this particular scribe has lent a brownish tinge to his black ink, and the book itself is quite small, no thicker or taller than any modern hardback on the shelf. Touch its springy, still-velvety surface, and you are touching history. You can almost smell it. You are in physical contact with something that was created nearly a thousand years ago, sometime around the year 1020, probably by a cleric working in the manuscript studio at Canterbury Cathedral.

  This ancient document is known today as the Julius Work Calendar. With its combination of calendar calculation and impressionistic sketching (see frontispiece), it is the earliest surviving document of its sort in England, and it provides the basis of this modern book that you have picked up and are now reading a millennium later - an attempt to look back and discover what life was like in England in the year 1000. We owe the survival of the document to the seventeenth-century book collector Sir Robert Cotton, who retrieved it from the dispersal of manuscripts that followed Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Sir Robert stored the little volume in his grand Westminster library, where each bookcase was decorated with the bust of a Roman emperor - Tiberius, Augustus, Diocletian, Nero, Vespasian, Julius - and these resonant imperial names became the basis of the Cotton cataloguing system. Tiberius D. Ill indicated a book that was stacked on the shelf marked D, third volume along, below the bust of Tiberius, and our work calendar was stacked below the bust of Julius Caesar.(1)

  At the time of writing, the Julius Work Calendar is preserved behind the fluted colonnades of the British Museum, but by the year 2000 it is destined to be transferred to the sparkling new British Library beside St. Pancras Station. In the course of the centuries, the calendar has lost the heavy wooden covers between which it was originally pressed to stop the vellum reverting to the shape of the animal from which it came. It bears the scratchings and scribblings of the generations - along with the scarrings of the old British Museum's once mandatory red stamp.

  In layout it is curiously contemporary - twelve months on twelve pages, each sheet headed with the name of that particular month and the sign of the zodiac. Its purpose was religious, to list the high days and holy days to be celebrated in church that month, probably as an instructional manual for young monks. Its 365 lines of Latin verse take the form of a sing-song doggerel which one can imagine the young oblates chanting as they were inducted into the rituals of the Christian year. In that sense, the calendar belongs to a world that is long vanished, but in spirit and appearance it is not that different from a twelve-page calendar hanging on the wall of a modern kitchen.

  Here is the earliest surviving example of an Englishman laying out life in a daily routine, juggling time, the schedule of the earth, and the life of the spirit. The days of the month are listed down the page, below that month's sign of the zodiac, and across the bottom of each sheet runs a delicate little drawing which illustrates the task of the month - a bearded ploughman following the oxen, shepherds gossiping while they watch over their sheep, two men reaping in harmony while another takes a rest. The artist's line is lithe and sprightly, depicting real human beings, not puppets. The figures have muscles and potbellies, bald heads, warts and frowns - joys and worries. These are people like us.

  Modern English history conventionally begins in 1066 with the arrival of William the Conqueror and the Normans, but we are going back before that, to late Anglo-Saxon England, where the cheerful and sturdy characters of the Julius Work Calendar open the door to a world which is both alien and curiously familiar. So welcome to the year 1000, and Lege Feliciter, as the Venerable Bede once put it: May you read happily!(2)

  January: For All the Saints

  If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000, the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was - very much the size of anyone alive today.(3) It is generally believed that we are taller than our ancestors, and that is certainly true when we compare our stature to the size of more recent generations. Malnourished and overcrowded, the inhabitants of Georgian or Victorian England could not match our health or physique at the end of the twentieth century.

  But the bones that have been excavated from the graves of people buried in England in the years around 1000 tell a tale of strong and healthy folk - the Anglo-Saxons who had occupied the greater part of the British Isles since the departure of the Romans. Nine out often of them lived in a green and unpolluted countryside on a simple, wholesome diet that grew sturdy limbs - and very healthy teeth. It was during the centuries that followed the first millennium that overpopulation and overcrowding started to affect the stature and well-being of western Europeans. Excavations of later medieval sites reveal bodies that are already smaller than those discovered from the years around 1000, and archaeologists who have studied these centuries say that they can almost see the devastation of the Black Death looming in the evidence of the increasingly frail and unhealthy skeletal remains.(4)

  Life was simple. People wore the simple, sack-like tunics
with leggings that we laugh at in the Monty Python movies, though in colours that were rather less muddy. Despite the lack of sharp chemical dyes in the year 1000, natural vegetable colourings could produce a range of strong and cheerful hues, with bright reds, greens, and yellows. It was a world without buttons, which had yet to be invented. Clothes were still fastened with clasps and thongs.

  Life was short. A boy of twelve was considered old enough to swear an oath of allegiance to the king, while girls got married in their early teens, often to men who were significantly older than they were. Most adults died in their forties, and fifty-year-olds were considered venerable indeed. No one “went out to work,” but the evidence of arthritis in the bones excavated from Anglo-Saxon graves indicates that most people endured a lifetime of hard manual labour - and the Julius Work Calendar shows the different forms which that labour could take. Across the bottom of Januarys calendar page moves the ploughman, slicing open England’s damp and often clay-ridden crust with the heavy iron blade that had been the making of the country’s farming landscape.

  “The ploughman feeds us all,” declared Aelfric, the Wessex schoolmaster who, in the years 987 to 1002, taught his pupils by getting them to observe and analyse the different economic activities they could see around them. “The ploughman gives us bread and drink.”(5)

  It looks so slow and primitive to us, the heavy plough dragged by the oxen train. But compared to farming technologies in many other parts of the world at that time, the wheeled and iron-bladed plough of northwestern Europe was supercharged, enabling just two men to tear up a whole acre of soil with the help of the beasts which not only provided the “horsepower,” but enriched the fields with their manure.

  The wheeled plough was the foundation of life for English people living in the year 1000. It opened the soil to air and water, enabling soluble minerals to reach deep levels, while rooting out weeds and tossing them aside to wither in the open air. It was not a new invention. In the middle of the first century A.D., the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described some such device in use to the north of the Alps, and the evidence suggests that this powerful and handy machine was the crucial element in cultivating the land cleared from Europe’s northwestern forests.(6) One man to hold the plough, one to walk with the oxen, coaxing and singing and, when necessary, goading the animals forward with a stick: this drawing shows the furrows of freshly turned earth, the secret of how the soil had been tamed in the course of the previous centuries. It was the reason why, by the turn of the millennium, England was able to support a population of at least a million souls.

  The calendar page on which the wheeled plough was sketched represented an equally developed and practical technology - the measuring of time. Today we take calendars for granted. Garages hand them out for nothing at Christmas. But the challenge of how to formulate a working system of dates had consumed the energies of the brightest minds for centuries, with every culture and religion devising its own system of reckoning, and in Christendom confusion centred particularly on the timing of the Church’s most important festival - Easter.

  The early Christians debated it furiously. Christ was crucified as the Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, so Easter’s timing depended on the Jewish lunar calendar based on the 29 1/2-day cycle from new moon to new moon. But planning a full year’s sequence of church festivals meant that the lunar timetable had to be fitted into the 365 1/4-day rotation of the seasons, based on the annual cycle of the sun - and whichever way you try to squeeze it, 29 1/2 into 365 1/4 does not go.

  “Such was the confusion in those days,” related the Venerable Bede, the great chronicler of the times, describing the calendar arguments in mid-seventh-century England, “that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year, so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday.”7

  The king was Oswy of Northumbria, the northernmost of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Oswy followed the calendar of the Irish-influenced monks of Lindisfarne, who first converted Northumbria, while his bride, Eanfled of Kent, stayed true to the Roman calculations with which she had been brought up in Canterbury. A learned synod was convened at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast to resolve this and several other conflicts of church practice, and it provoked deep ill-humour.

  “Easter is observed by men of different nations and languages at one and the same time in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and throughout the world,” argued Canterbury’s representative. “The only people who stupidly contend against the whole world are those Irishmen and their partners in obstinacy, the Picts and Britons, who inhabit only a portion of these, the two uppermost islands of the ocean.”(8)

  “It is strange that you call us stupid,” retorted the Irish delegation, citing the Apostle John as their authority. They set out their own system of juggling the moon and sun cycles with all the disdainful superiority of the senior faith, since the Irish had been Christians long before the English. St. Patrick had established his church in Ireland a century and a half before Pope Gregory’s envoy Augustine arrived in Canterbury to found the English church, and it had been missionaries from Ireland, not Kent, who had Christianised Scotland and the north of England.

  But when the seaside convention concluded its arguments, it was Canterbury that won the day - a victory, in terms of church politics, for the centralising authority of the Pope in Rome, and a decision, in terms of the calendar, that opened the way for Bede, the monk from Tyneside who was both historical chronicler and master mathematician, to work out a system of dating that would settle the argument once and for all.

  On the eve of the year 2000, the English have staked a proprietorial interest in the turning of the second millennium, thanks to Greenwich with its mean time and the zero line of longitude. Thanks to the Venerable Bede, they could claim a similar interest in the first. Not that we should look for Domes or any special miliennarial monuments in 1000 a.d. It was an anniversary which, by definition, could only mean something to people who dated their history from the birth of Jesus, and even inside Christendom there were varying interpretations of that. But if any country worked to dates we would recognise today, it was England, and that was because of the Venerable Bede, who popularised the use of the Anno Domini system through his famous work De Temporum Ratione, “On the Reckoning of Time.”

  Composed in 725 a.d., De Temporum Ratione was based on the Easter calculations of the sixth-century Scythian scholar Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Little). In the course of compiling Easter tables for Pope John I, Dionysius had remarked, almost incidentally, how inappropriate it was for the Church to rely upon the pagan calendar of the Romans,(9) particularly since its years dated back to the great persecutor of the Christians, the Emperor Diocletian. Would it not make more sense, Dionysius had suggested, to date the Christian era from the birth of our Saviour Himself, which could be designated as the year 1?

  The scholar made two major errors at this point. The concept of zero had not yet entered Western mathematical thinking, which operated in Roman numerals, so Dionysius’s Christian era missed out the twelve months of year 0 needed to get to the start of year 1. Still more seriously, the year that Dionysius selected for Christ’s birth actually fell four years after the death of the notorious King Herod, who had been so memorably enraged by the birth in Bethlehem of a rival king of the Jews. The Gospel description of Christ’s birth as occurring in the reign of Herod means that Jesus was probably born in 4 B.C., or even earlier (which also means that the second millennium of his birth should actually have been celebrated in 1996 or 1997, and not in the year 2000).

  Bede detected this error in Dionysius’s proposed year 1 a.d., but evidently felt that the few years of inaccuracy mattered less than the dazzling concept of dating history according to the” Years of Grace,” the era of Christ’s reign on earth. When Bede composed his great Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, he used the Anno Domini dating system, and when, at the end of
the next century, the scribes of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle started their work of recording England’s history year by year, it was Bede’s system that they followed.

  Confusion remained as to what day was the true beginning of the Christian year. Bede took it for granted that the year should begin with the birth of Christ himself, on December 25. But following that logic back through nine months of pregnancy, one arrived at March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day, the festival celebrated by the church in commemoration of Mary’s visitation from the Angel Gabriel, and the news that she was bearing the Christ child. For a Christian this represented the earliest manifestation of the Divine Presence on earth, and Lady Day was accordingly celebrated for centuries as the true beginning of the year. As late as the 1660s, Samuel Pepys reflected this enduring confusion in his Diaries, starting his reckoning of the years on Lady Day (March 25), but also noting the Roman consular date of January 1 as “New Year’s Day.”

  All this complicated grappling with the imponderables of sun, moon, stars, and the fallible accretions of human history is graphically displayed on the pages of the Julius Work Calendar, which takes the twelve Roman months with which we today are familiar, and overlays them with a filigree of Christian elaboration. The mysterious-looking columns of letters and numerals that run down the left-hand side of every page are part of the mechanism for calculating Easter and other festivals. The so-called Golden numbers indicate the occurrence of the new moon, while the Dominical letters show where Sundays will fall in any given year - since this calendar does not relate to one particular set of twelve months. It is a perpetual calendar, and its complicated codings are like the innards of a computer, baffling to the layman, but the route to knowledge for those who understand the code.

  One inch in from the left of the page runs a solid column of Roman numerals setting out the day of the month according to the Romans’ own daunting system of counting things backwards - from KL, the Kalends, or first day of the month, down through the Nones to the Ides, the turning point of the month, which fell on the thirteenth or fifteenth. But it is the writing to the right of the date that really matters, for here was listed the main purpose of the calendar, the names of the saints and religious festivals to be observed.